Turkey has fired back at Syria after Syrian mortar bombs killed five people and wounded eight others in a Turkish town near the border, says the Turkish Prime Minister’s office. NATO schedules an urgent meeting to be held later in the day.
“Our armed forces in the border region immediately retaliated against this heinous attack… by shelling the targets spotted by radar,” Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s office said in a statement. According to Syrian media, Turkish artillery hit targets in the province of Idlib.
Turkey is now deploying tanks, artillery and missile batteries to the Syria border, reports Mahir Zeynalov, a journalist with the prominent Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman, citing sources on the ground.
NATO ambassadors are to convene later in the day to discuss the shelling of the Turkish town. The meeting will be held under NATO Article 4, for consultations when a member state feels territorial integrity is under threat, officials say.

Syrian officials are investigating to know wo started fire and offer their condolences to the families of the martyrs in Turkey.
Syria calls for cooperation to control Syrian and Turkish borders. This accident could have occured b
etween any two other neighboring countries
There are undisciplined groups on the borders and they represent a threat to regional security
The Syrian Minister of information repeated condolences to the Turkish people, describing them as brothers. and friends. Then, he added that Syria respects the principle of having good relationships with one’s neighbors and renews its call to respect Syrian National sovereignty and prevent the infiltration of terrorists.

Several explosions have hit Sa’ad Allah al-Jabiri Square in Syria’s largest city of Aleppo, killing at least 31 people and injuring scores of others, local Syrian media say.
Two car bomb attacks were carried out in western Aleppo on Wednesday morning.
A third blast is said to have occurred when a mortar shell was fired at the square by foreign-backed insurgents.
The explosions have damaged several high buildings in the area.

The Syrian insurgency will never win its war because its means are unsupported even among the opposition, political analyst Dan Glazebrook told RT. But thanks to a flood of weapons from the West, they will continue to destabilize the country.
ÂÂÂ­Syria, Glazebrook says, is the only link keeping Western powers from dominating the region, which is why the anti-Assad coalition is sending weapons and funding the “proxy war” through Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
…RT: With Washington now pledging $45 million worth of extra support to the rebels, how much longer can the opposition keep up the fight without direct foreign intervention?DG: We have to get over the idea that there is no foreign direct intervention. There is a foreign direct intervention already now – and there has been for many, many months. There were groups on the ground calling themselves part of the Free Syrian Army, but there are entire units made up of Libyans, of Lebanese, of people from Jordan, of people from Saudi Arabia. They have been armed and also equipped and trained by the SAS and by the CIA, at camps in Turkey.
In fact if the situation in Libya – the war in Libya last year – is anything to go on, from what we know happened there, they were probably under the direct command of British and US Army officers. So I do not think it’s true to say that the current situation is one without direct foreign intervention.
The other thing to bear in mind, the $45 million of aid from the US is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the weapons and the funding for the West’s proxy war against Syria is being channeled through Saudi Arabia and through Qatar. Now, just Britain alone for example, last year provided ÂÂÂ£1.75 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, and much of it is now ending up in the hands of these proxy militias. So that $45 million figure is actually just the tip of the iceberg.